For a detailed account of how the program was developed:

 

For an inside look at how the program works

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
The  Young Canadian Leadership Challenge® is a team role-playing game. Young men and women from 10-19 "rise to the occasion" to meet and solve Survivor *-like challenges, discover what is best in themselves, while enjoying themselves thoroughly, and take the results they get back to their lives.
 
 

for the Ottawa Citizen article on our Sept. 2004 Young Canadian Leadership Challenge

* Survivor is a reality television series. Challenges tested to adult standards with full safety measures. Participants not only survive, but thrive in the face of difficult adult-level Ropes Course challenges.

What Works - What Works in Spades!

Work with youth based on a zero tolerance model simply does not work. But are there some things that simply do work? Harrison Owen (The Practice of Peace), a facilitator of adult large group meetings, spent a year organizing a meeting of stakeholders, only to find that attendees rated the coffee breaks as the most productive parts of the meeting. Taking this to be valuable feedback, and remembering his own experience in Africa where community meetings happened with only the spontaneity of the participants and a simple noticeboard where people posted their own agendas, he created (1985) a new and delightfully workable process called Open Space. Now this process is used throughout the world. And it works!

 Models of Workability

Psychiatrist and well known author Dr. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled), frustrated by the turtle-like steps taken by individuals in psychotherapy, began to organize groups of 50 or more people (Community Building Workshops) to come together for a weekend, with little or no intervention by workshop leaders except the occasional imposition of silence, infrequent storytelling and feedback to the group. The results were researched, and sweeping positive movement among individuals was seen to spring up widely among participants.

Physicist David Bohm (The Undivided Universe, Wholeness and The Implicate Order)  in the latter 20 years of his work on physics gathered individuals together from diverse fields to Dialog - by which he meant to explore and inquire into the meanings behind the way they thought about things. Dialog caught on, due to its success, and is now used in many group processes.

Psychologist Martin E. Seligman (The Optimistic Child, Learned Optimism), wondering if depression among adolescent children could be prevented, devised a simple conversational method and then gathered children considered as vulnerable to depression to test it. He deftly engaged Philadelphia Grade 5 and 6 students in a challenge to find alternatives to thinking which was riddled with negative expectations. Longitudinal research showed that with only 12 hours to work with, and a process so simple and straightforward that it could be administered by teachers and parents, at least half of  participants were seen to have escaped their vulnerability to depression, and to have maintained their freedom in the years which ensued. 

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What do the successes of Harrison Owen, Scott Peck, David Bohm and Martin E. Seligman have in common? And what do they share in common with the Young Canadian Leadership Challenge? Anthropologist Victor Turner (1920-82) (From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure) describes a three part process by which participants pass through three stages, during which they rise to higher levels of complexity much in the way Dr. Ilya Prigogineís Nobel Prize winning Theory of Dissipative Structures predicts. 
 

 Turnerís Three Phases of Transformation

In Turnerís Part One, the participants are removed from familiar environments, where they have been entrained to offer familiar solutions to problems. In unfamiliar space they begin to  feel a healthy sense of chaos. In Part Two, which Turner calls ìliminal spaceî (limen is the Latin word for threshold) participants are ìbetwixt and betweenî - not ruled by the environment from which they came, and not yet invested in the environment to which they will return. In liminal space one has to innovate, draw on deeper currents within, engage in trial and error, for here, no precedents or rules guide the process. 

In Part Three, participants practice applying insights, inner stirrings, new respect for the diversity seen in others, and a transcendent sense of responsibility for the whole (Turner calls this communitas - the Latin term for the spontaneously arising sense of community.) From this process comes fundamental change - the participants retain their individuality, but tinged with a greater appreciation for the equal individuality of others - and then apply this to their lives.

The Young Canadian Leadership Challenge and Other Workable Approaches to Youth

None of the successful approaches outlined above follow the conventional wisdom - which suggests that careful control, top-down organization and zero tolerance for certain undesirable behaviours succeeds with youth. And certainly, in arguably the most successful approach in the world, the work of Michael Meade, exactly the opposite approach is taken.

Now the research shows that conventional approaches lag behind what we have come to know about operating successfully in the adult world. In the youth subculture, violence-laced struggles (bullying) to rise in the pecking order among boys (Dan Kindlon &  Michael Thompson) and self-denying enslavement to currying popularity among girls (Mary Pipher) are the realities which shape youth behaviour. Designers ignore these current realities at their own peril. Developing rapport with young people requires that we meet them on their own playing fields, and that we make the space safe for the necessary explorations of how they relate to each other.

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Successful Models For Youth

In 2001 a researcher in the United States searched youth programs to determine what worked. The answer as seen in the widely-acclaimed Boys Will Be Men rests in a few programs, including Michael Meade's work with adolescent boys -which just happens to fit the Victor Turner Model. - 

1.) extraction of the youth from familiar environments, 

2.) offering them challenges for which their culture-reinforced behaviours provide less than adequate responses, utilizing their inherent humanity which supports self respect and appreciation for others, and then 

3.) offers the opportunity to try on new attitudes, moral standards - which they have derived themselves from within. All of this happens within a safe space where trial runs within broad limits (like the rules of a game) is the order of the day.

Much like Michael Meadeís visibly successful work with boys as seen on Boys Will Be Men, theYoung Canadian Leadership Challenge creates a brief (40 hr.) low cost - but effective environment in which not only youth but community-minded adult volunteers are placed in a crucible of challenge, with few rules and no guidelines to feel their way through a series of mental-emotional-physical challenges to find a mythical treasure. Turnerís sequence of separation from ìusual environments,î the creation of liminal space, the subsequent opportunity to practice new behaviours and the relative absence of top-down intervention, provide a workable and successful environment for permanent self-sustainable life-change. 
 

To contact Program Creator, BRIAN BAILEY M.D. directly, call 819-827-0561
or e-mail him at:
brian@econichehouse.com or brian@leadersoftomorrrowinstitute.com